The next morning Josie’s foot was much better. She had always recovered quickly from cuts and scratches, and she seemed to recover even quicker in this new world. After breakfast she set out with Tash to find the lock that fit the ruby key.
Tash described each room as they came to it, led Josie to the more interesting bits, and looked at any shiny objects that attracted his attention, while Josie carefully felt over the walls, bookcases, chests, and anything else that might conceal a keyhole.
‘He would not want to keep it very far from himself,’ said Josie, feeling impatient and irritable after an hour of searching. ‘So we probably won’t have to go far.’
The hidden door was in fact in the magician’s bedchamber, whose walls were covered with a great deal of elaborately carved panelling. Some of them depicted scenes featuring the woman from the statue in the garden – at least, Josie expected it was the woman from the statue, from Tash’s description – vanquishing various enemies or gesturing grandly, and it was one of these scenes that hid the keyhole. It was the third time Josie had gone over that particular bit of panelling, and she was just about ready to give up and move on to the next room.
‘Imagine putting it just there,’ thought Josie, blushing. ‘What beasts those men of Telmar were.’ She did not call to Tash , who was in the next room clattering the glassware on the bookcases . For some reason she could not explain was already quite sure this was the keyhole that fit the key. Making a sour face, she put the key in and managed to turn it after a bit of wriggling about.
Josie tugged hard on the end of the key, and the whole panel, which went almost to the ceiling, swung open on silent hinges.
‘Here it is,’ she called to Tash.
There was a crash as Tash swept something fragile from the bookcase in his haste to join her, and a moment later he was at her side, peering through the open doorway. The air beyond the panel had the feel of a very large inside space, rather than a little room.
‘It is just a place for hanging garments,’ said Tash, disappointed. ‘There are some robes in bright colours, and some boxes on the floor- maybe there is something interesting in one of them.’ He crouched down and Josie could hear him rummaging in a space that was rather too small for him.
‘It feels like a large room,’ said Josie.
‘No, it isn’t – oh, you are right. Behind the curtain it goes on. There are stairs.’
‘May I?’ asked Josie, and limped past Tash. Sure enough, two sides of the little dressing room were proper stone walls, one was the panel they had swung aside, and the third was a stairway going down, behind a heavy damask curtain. Josie took a few steps down the stairs without thinking; when she did stop, and thought about what she was doing, she felt oddly like she was being pulled through some resistant substance. She felt that there was something fascinating down the stairs, something that she ached with a kind of homesickness to get to. At the same time there was a resistance, like she was trying to wade through waist-deep water, or walk against a strong wind; if she let her feet move idly of their own accord, it was hardly noticeable, but if she thought about taking a step, it made it nearly impossible to go forward.
‘Wait,’ said Tash. ‘It is dark. I will find a light.’
‘Alright,’ said Josie. But she did not end up waiting. She took one step, and then another, down the staircase, and when she heard Tash’s voice again it was quite a way above her.
‘Josie?’
‘Down here,’ said Josie. ‘It is safe.’ She was surprised how safe she felt. The feeling that she was pushing against something had gotten stronger and then abruptly stopped, replaced by a kind of cheerful crispness to the air. It did not smell any different from the air above, but she felt she could breathe more easily. It was as if there was a good magic down here, a good magic that was being held back by the wicked magic of the men of Telmar, and she had just moved into the atmosphere of the good magic from the atmosphere of the wicked magic.
‘Like I have just come out of a stuffy room, instead of going into a cellar,’ she thought.
Long before Tash had returned the wall on one side of Josie had dropped away, and she ran the fingers of her right hand lightly along a balustrade of stone. The stairs were curving gently around the edge of a round room that felt as big as a country hall- big enough to have dances in- and it was filled to the brim with what she was thinking of as good magic. She took a few deep breaths of it.
‘There is something powerful here,’ said Tash, reproaching her. ‘You should not have come alone.’ She could smell the smoke from the lamp he held.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She took one of his hands. ‘But it feels like something powerful and good, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tash.
‘You have to admit it does seem dreadfully like a treasure chamber,’ said Josie.
They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Tash said there was something in the middle of the room, which was also where the sense of good magic felt strongest to Josie. It was a round dais big enough for a string quartet to play on, surrounded by something like an altar rail except in one place where there was a gap, with steps leading onto the dais.
Tash eagerly forged ahead, peering at things. ‘What are those? Armour for humans, I think. There’s something at the top of the steps, in the way. What is it?’
‘’It’s a wooden box,’ said Josie, feeling the curve of the unpolished wood. There was a lid on the box, but it did not fit snugly, and when she sniffed the air she could smell the unmistakeable scent of fresh apples.
‘Apples,’ she said, very softly. ‘There are apples in it.’
A sudden fear came over her. There might be good magic here, but she had never thought of what good magic would really be like. It was a terrible wild good magic, a magic that would think nothing of using her for some greater good, that would weigh her hopes and desires no more than the hopes and desires of a billion billion other beings. It would use her as its instrument until she was blunt and broken, she felt; she would have done good, far more good than she would ever have done on her own, but she would still be broken at the end of it.
Tash had clambered over the railing in another place while Josie examined the box and was exploring the dais. ‘There are two suits of armour, very shiny ones. Maybe one for both kinds of human? And here is a table with food and drink. It’s very strange, it seems perfectly good.’
‘Don’t touch it,’ said Josie.
‘I won’t,’ said Tash obediently. ‘Oh, and there are two shields here, with pictures of lions on them, and some swords. I can feel the magic, Josie; it’s a kind of magic that keeps things from decaying, I think, everything seems perfectly new even though it must have been down here a long time.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Josie.
‘And there is a – yes.’ Tash climbed back over the railing and joined Josie where she stood a few paces back from the dais.
‘What was in the box?’ he asked.
‘More food,’ said Josie. ‘Kept perfectly good by magic, like you found.’
‘Are you sure you want to go? There is so much, and we have not found the wand, or the apples.’
‘We can come back here any time,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I think there is something wrong with the lamp, anyway.’
Even as she left, Josie felt the same homesick longing to remain in the hidden chamber, nearly as strong as the fear that drove her away from it. It was the same as when she had first heard the name of Aslan, the name she could still not bring herself to say aloud.
***
‘They didn’t seem at all the things the men of Telmar would have made, so I expect it is from when the Lion was here,’ Josie told Tash, when they were sitting comfortably upstairs again. Tash had not felt the magic of the treasure chamber as strongly as Josie, only enough to make the experience feel even more splendid and adventurous. Even the climb back, when the lamp had given out and Josie had had to guide him up the stairs, had been a great adventure. He had seen magic do so many terrible things in the past few days, and it was cheering to see magic used to do things that were beautiful and useful instead.
‘After he turned the people here into beasts, he must have left these things behind, with the good magic to preserve them. Until the next bit of his story.’ Josie looked very wise and regal as she said these things, Tash thought.
‘What use would a lion have for armour and weapons? And human sorts of food?’
‘Maybe the two suits of armour are for two heroes who are supposed to come here. And the food could be magic food that they are supposed to eat, or give to someone else. In the stories the gazelles told, the Lion would be there to explain it to them, so it would make sense. I don’t know much about this Lion, but if he did leave those things there I think we should leave them alone. Yustus seemed to have left them alone. I think he was probably afraid to touch them.’
Tash considered this. If this lion god was even a very little bit like the Overlord Varkarian, it would be foolish to meddle in his plans. That must be why Josie had wanted them to leave, before they could accidentally disturb anything.
‘You think it is dangerous,’ he said. ‘I think so too.’ He took one of her hands and rubbed it to show how much he agreed with her.
She nodded, ‘We can look there again, and maybe if we are in desperate trouble there is something there we can use, but I think we should leave that place alone.’ She retrieved her hand to do something with her hair. Tash watched admiringly as she arranged it away from her face and tied it back.
‘This is the first real sign of good magic that we have seen ourselves here, though,’ Josie said when she was done. A note of uncertainty came into her voice. ‘Maybe we should make plans to travel to this Prince Margis who the gazelles wanted me to see, who I was trying to get to before.’ She bit her lip. ‘But, he is supposed to be coming here. Maybe the gazelles were wrong, and I’m not meant to warn him away from this place, but meet him here.’
‘Then it would make sense for all the magic things to be here,’ agreed Tash.
Josie sighed. ‘You’d think, if we were part of a prophecy in a fairy tale, it would be explained to us so we knew what to do.’
‘Do you think I am part of the prophecy too?’ asked Tash hopefully.
‘I don’t know that is something to wish for,’ said Josie, smiling at Tash. ‘I get the feeling it is like being a tool – in a prophecy you are just an instrument for someone else to use, without caring how you feel about it.’
Tash bowed his head and drooped his arms, just a little. ‘That is what life is, I thought.’
‘Poor Tash,’ said Josie, taking one of his hands in two of hers.
‘I still wonder where those apples of immortality are,’ Tash wondered aloud.
‘Oh,’ Josie said slowly. ‘They’re around here somewhere. I’m sure we’ll find them. Now,’ she continued more briskly. ‘You were going to tell me your story.’
Tash supposed he could. She had told him all of her story, after all, and he would have to tell her about Nera sooner or later.
‘I was always told I was useless,’ Tash began, and recounted his story very much as you have read it here.
‘Oh, Tash,’ said Josie when he had finished, putting her arms around his neck. ‘It is too terrible. That poor girl. Don’t worry, it will be better now.’ And she kissed his beak again. Tash thought again how strangely pleasant she smelled.
***
The next few months were the nicest months of Tash’s life. The fresh food soon ran out, but there was plenty of stored food of the kind that keeps practically forever. Josie became quite good at cooking in the old-fashioned clay ovens in the kitchen of Telmar, and everything they had to eat was very much nicer than pickled grith. The air was too dry, but Tash could have hot baths every day, as often as he liked. They found early on a way down from the castle to the forest that only involved clearing a few brambles away and breaking through one rather poorly bricked-in doorway, so they could go down every now and again. Tash found he had a talent for hunting the black pigs that roamed in the forest, and the wild dogs learned to give them a wide berth; they gathered nuts and fruit and wild onions, and there was a deep pool downstream of the castle where they could catch delicious silvery fishes. On these trips they formed a fair idea of the place they were in. On three sides the valley where the castle lay was bounded by high country- not terribly high mountains, but tall enough to be dusted with snow long before the valley floor. On the fourth side it fell away downward in a tumbled way, with no very great obstacles as far as the limits of their expeditions, half-a-day’s Tash walk from the castle. The stream began in a waterfall some distance to the north of the castle, looped around it, and then a little way below the fishing pool descended steep rapids into a gorge. All of the valley was thickly overgrown with cypress trees, with no clearings of any size. The traces of whatever fields and roads the men of Telmar once had were entirely effaced by time.
Tash and Josie made these trips more seldom after the first snow fell, but then there was exploring of the castle to be done: it had been the living place of scores of the men of Telmar before they became so deplorably wicked, and although much of it was half ruined – roofless and overgrown with weeds – there were no end of intact halls and passages to explore, with secret underground passages and doors that had been locked for generations.
So Tash had an abundance of things to find out about, and felt himself to be abundantly useful in helping Josie, whose life he had saved: Josie, who trusted him with responsibilities, and shared all she had with him, and touched him kindly, and became more pleasing to his senses day by day, and never once said that he was completely and utterly useless. He did not complain that she did not want to visit the hidden room with the magic food and the suits of armour again, for she was after all Mistress of Telmar, and he felt joy in doing what she wanted.
It would not be quite true to say that these months were the nicest of Josie’s life. There had been many uncomplicated months of her life before her family’s troubles had begun, and even months afterward that had not seemed particularly noteworthy at the time, but in hindsight now seemed perfect, and she thought back on those as the happiest months of her life. She had of course at first been almost dizzy with joy at not being a prisoner of the wicked magician any more, with a horrible fate creeping closer day by day: but that sort of happiness never lasts as long as you think it will.
Josie had all she needed in the castle of Telmar. She was safe, and comfortable, and her memories of home had faded so that she hardly ever thought about Gerry, or her mother, and did not feel sad. She almost never quarrelled with Tash, who treated her with affection and respect, but she did not like keeping the secret of the apples from him. She knew in her bones that it would be wrong to use the apples, and she knew in her bones that Tash was different from her in this way, and did not have this same knowledge. Sometimes she would open the secret panel with the ruby key, but never went further than the first few steps, where she could just start to feel the call of the good magic. Josie had a nagging feeling of guilt that she was going down the wrong path and was somehow not doing something she was supposed to be doing.
Then there was the other matter with Tash. She had allowed herself liberties with him at the beginning that she would never have allowed from a boy, thinking of him as a kind of talking animal. And it was true, she supposed, that he was. But he was the only one of his kind of creature here, and she was the only one of her kind of creature, and when he touched her she had begun to feel so particularly a female sort of creature. He had first curled up around her to keep her warm, and to comfort her, and she had welcomed him. He would be terribly hurt if she were to insist that he stop now. But the habit of sleeping together was one that she knew had become wrong, as she became more aware of his maleness, and she often spent the nights in an agitated state, half enduring and half enjoying his embrace. Being blind, Josie had a very sensitive sense of touch, and her touch had been starved for the feel of living things: it felt so very good to touch someone, to be touched in return. So she had let Tash’s unknowing hands stray to places she would have driven a human boy’s hands from with furious blushes.
‘He is devoted to me in his way,’ Josie told herself, sternly. ‘He is as fine a friend as any I could ask for, and the only friend I have in this world. It would not be fair to push him away because of things that I feel, because I am confused. It is complicated, but life is complicated. It would be just as bad if a Prince had rescued me. Worse, because though he would know where the bounds of proper behaviour were, they might not be at all the same here as in Australia. And being a Prince he would probably be used to people doing whatever he wanted to regardless. And furthermore, he would expect me to be grateful – which I would be – and happy to be lorded over – which I wouldn’t, instead of being as accommodating as Tash is. I expect he would probably expect me to marry him straightaway, like in the fairy stories.’ These were the sort of things Josie told herself.
So Josie was troubled, but she let things keep on going the way they were going. Much more trouble is drifted into in such a way then ever results from people boldly charging in and doing something recklessly wicked.